It was a gold buckle engraved with snakes and interwoven beasts – such an extraordinary piece that the British Museum’s medieval antiquity keeper almost collapsed when he saw it; Shoulder rings with jewelery and belt accessories; a beautiful, decorated helmet with a full face mask – the haunting vision of an ancient hero who seems to look back over the centuries.
What the discovery meant
Brown’s discovery made the letters of history literally rewritten. The ship and its contents were, it turned out, from the Dark Ages, and the discovery illuminated those four centuries between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings, about which so little was known. The Anglo-Saxons who ruled over the various kingdoms of England during this time were considered a rude and backward people – almost primitive – but here were made articles of great beauty. This was a society that valued skills, crafts and art and traded with Europe and beyond.
And these relics of a sophisticated and lost civilization appeared just as ours was threatened with destruction by the Nazis. The chief archaeologist gave a speech to site visitors and had to shout to be heard above the roar of a Spitfire.
When author and journalist John Preston, whose book about the embarrassed British politician Jeremy Thorpe, A Very English Scandal, was recently adapted into a successful TV series, he discovered that Piggott, his aunt, was involved in the excavations, he investigated the story immediately recognized what a rich stitch it offered a novelist. Dig was published for acclaim in 2007. Robert Harris called it “a real literary treasure,” and Ian McEwan called it “very fine, captivating, extremely original.”
Producer Ellie Wood, who previously worked on a number of TV adaptations, including Decline and Fall, Bleak House and The Line of Beauty, says she wanted to make a film version as soon as she read the novel’s manuscript in 2006, before it was even published.